Contested Circumpolar:
Domestic Territories

La Biennale di Venezia 2021
“How Will We Live Together?”
curated by Hashim Sarkis

Authors
Matthew Jull
Leena Cho
Mason White
Lola Sheppard

Collaborators
Anthony Averbeck
Vincent Chuang
Ben DiNapoli
Cam Fullmer
Jane Lee
Julia Nakanishi
Kearon Roy Taylor
Ben Small
Andrew Spears
Timothy Victorio
Tian Wang
Zihao Wei

Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories is an exhibit for the 2021 Venice Biennale “How Will We Live Together?” curated by Hashim Sarkis. CCDT is a collaboration between Arctic Design Group and Lateral Office.

Claimed by the eight Arctic nations—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States—while also being the borderless home of numerous Indigenous peoples, the Arctic is a complex, contested space in the twenty-first century. Territorial claims, resource extraction, climate change, and ongoing colonialism reflect the range of ways in which inhabitation has been imposed and negotiated in the last hundred years. Simultaneously, distinct stories of daily life of inhabitants who call the Arctic home further reflect a richly heterogeneous, cultural landscape at the forefront of accelerated transformations.

Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories represents complex narratives of inhabitation from each of the eight Arctic nations to reveal entangled connections between domestic space to the territorial space. The installation situates domestic life within the broader sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical forces unique to the Arctic. Conceived as “domestic core samples,” each model captures the array of objects, tools, and machines that enable domestic-territorial linkages that represent collective matters of concern to be addressed in the urbanizing Arctic.